Monday, 30 April 2012

*****
How do you pull together a group of
disparate super-heroes and their super-heavy emotional baggage in one
movie and make it watchable? It is the thought that intrigued me most
about the new Marvel Avengers movies. How can you cram them all into
1hr. 42mins and still make a fast-paced action movie? Especially as
some characters, notably Black Widow and Hawkeye are not well known
to a mass audience.

Director Joss Whedon has managed the
feat very well, giving each superhero just enough back-plot and cameo
to flesh out a plot revolving around Tom Hiddleston's beautiful bad
boy antihero Loki. The only sacrifice seems to be the pace, the first
half of the movie slowly slots together like a jigsaw only to break
up into a chaotic, super- fast CGI finale. This odd change of pace
forces two effects. The back stories of the super-heroes who have to
wait till the latter half of the film for their cameos get slightly
lost (in particular Hawkeye played with ease by Jeremy Renner) and
Loki and his evil master-plan become sidelined by the very impressive
CGI action.

Slightly surprisingly, the Incredible
Hulk steals the film away from his superhero buddies, with Mark
Ruffalo playing both Banner and Hulk to great effect. His
not-so-jolly green behemoth's rage is a great foil to the super-slick
Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and squeaky-clean Captain America (Chris
Evans). And then that still leaves several more superheroes to
mention, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson),
as well Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury trying to inspire a bit of
teamwork and keep their super-egos in check and whereas I've run out
of time to discuss them, in the film they get a reasonably chunky bit
of action and plot to themselves. And that is the genius of this
movie, it's all your favourite super-heroes rolled into one big
popcorntastic blockbuster of a movie. Go see it, it's what cinema and
special effects were made for. It really won't be the same on a small
screen.

That great big green belly laugh moment
is still making smile, so a marvellous four out of five star rating.